Monday, December 8, 2014

Alternatives to Docker: LXD and Rocket

Two recently announced alternatives to the Docker Linux container runtime LXD and Rocket aim to offer some interesting value propositions. Before I get to the details, let's first identify what use cases and aspects of the Docker container runtime of interest here. Docker identifies a few major categories of use cases: continuous integration, continuous delivery, scaling distributed applications, and Platform-as-a-Service. The former two are DevOps use cases. At this point, Docker pretty much has a lock on DevOps use cases. Moreover, neither of the would-be competitors truly target DevOps. It becomes obvious when you consider that LXD was intended to run on OpenStack Server environments and Rocket on CoreOS/fleet (though it is not necessarily tied to CoreOS). Docker runs on workstation environments and even on top of VirtualBox via boot2docker to support DevOps functionality on MacOS X. The more competitive aspect is the cloud infrastructure one. Here, Docker is competing with a wider range of technologies to support scaling on the cloud and providing PaaS functionality. This is the market where LXD and Rocket would operate. This is also the area where hypervisors have reigned.

LXD and Rocket are at very early stages of development so it is difficult to precisely compare them with Docker. Both LXD and Rocket aim to bring designed-in security to the container runtime. LXD aims to enable live migration, which is a significant feature supported by hypervisors and have not made it into container runtimes.

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